1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of assigning, activating and inventorying of telecommunications services, and more specifically relates to switch load balancing in assignment of services to customers of a telecommunications company.
2. Related Art
In local loop assignment and provisioning by a telephone company (telco), each telecommunications switch controlled by the telco includes individual cards, each having ports. Ports in a switch serve every customer's telephone service. The ports can cater to all the features, or services, requested by the customer, such as call waiting, call forwarding, or the like. Conventionally, port selection has been performed in an ad hoc manner. In the prior art method, technicians have been unable to take into account the load balancing of the switches when providing new features or services.
Specifically, since new services are supplied on an ad hoc basis, it is difficult for a technician to avoid overloading particular switches or cards on the switch. Such overloading can include the utilization, or assignment, of too many ports out of a particular subgroup of ports, or providing too many ports for a particular type of service, for example, ISDN, in a particular group of ports. An additional loading issue that is not addressed is the fact that the prior method of allocating services to ports does not systematically take into account the distance between the port to be assigned and the frame to which the port will be connected. Thus, in the prior art method, it is difficult to minimize the length of jumper wires used to connect the ports to the frame. In view of the foregoing, it has been difficult to ensure that adding new services or customers does not overload central office (CO) hardware and software.